After months of inactivity, offices that have been closed since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic are slowly resuming work. As the world slowly comes back to offices after working from home for months, people are being faced with challenges every day. One of them is the daily commute to work. With the infectious Covid-19 pandemic rendering public transport unsafe, many have opted for personal vehicles such as two-wheelers and cars. One government employee from the city of Nanded in Maharashtra, however, seems to have ditched the ordinary for the extraordinary after he asked his employer permission to commute to work every day on a horse.
Satish Punjabrao Deshmukh, who works as an Assistant Accounts Officer in the Employment Guarantee Scheme Department at Nanded Collectorate, has written a letter to the Collector’s office seeking permission to come to work daily on a horse.
According to the letter, Deshmukh suffered from back pain and was looking for a convenient way to reach the office on time every day. Due to his condition, riding a bike to work was very painful. Unable to ride a bike or afford a car, Satish had chosen to buy a horse instead. In his letter, Deshmukh sought not only permission to arrive to the office every day on a horse but also to “park” the horse within the office premises.
The letter, which surfaced online, has gone viral on social media with some poking fun at the bizarre request while others sympathized with the man.
The incident from Maharashtra went viral days after a lawyer from Varanasi applied to learn horse riding at a training school run by the city’s mounted police. In his application addressed to Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), the lawyer Dr. Harish Chandra Maurya said that his home was located 20 kms away from court and he wanted to learn horse-riding so that he could ride to work every day. Maurya wrote the letter in wake of rising fuel prices.